One thing many viewers have probably missed in all the horse-race speculation is that Palin is perfectly willing to discuss her positions on key issues, if anyone wants to ask. In fact, in recent days, weeks, and months, we've seen a lot of policy commentary from the former Alaska governor.

once reporters tracked her down, Palin was eager to engage. At stop after stop after stop, she answered questions on everything from energy subsidies to the debt ceiling to her favorite brand of designer jeans.... Palin's refusal to inform the media of her itinerary grabbed headlines, but the storyline overshadowed the fact that the brigade of reporters chasing Palin were usually able to get a heads up on her next move and arrive prepared at the next stop...
The Palin team's stubborn and unconventional game plan also fed an inaccurate media narrative that the potential presidential candidate was actively ignoring the media.

Quite the opposite.... she took questions from the media 17 different times over the course of four days.

Call it “The Politics of Doing Whatever the Heck I Want.” There she went again, disrespecting the almighty “process,” playing by her own rules and seeming not to give a flying hoot what anyone thought about it. That included the so-called key Republicans, party insiders and self-important activists whom she also seemed to ignore en route. These are many of the same people who trashed Ms. Palin’s bus tour as ill-conceived and disorganized in (often anonymous) comments to the wild-goose-chasers.

These are many of the same usual suspects who complained that Ms. Palin had breached campaign decorum by showing up in New Hampshire last week on the very day Mitt Romney was formally announcing his presidential campaign there. Never mind that Mr. Romney has essentially been running for president for six years (or since kindergarten). He had designated Thursday as his “announcement day,” and, the decorum police felt, the rest of the field was obliged to stay out of the way in deference to the “unwritten rule” that says Mr. Romney should have the stage to himself on these special occasions. Likewise, the political media was obliged to treat Mr. Romney’s impeccably choreographed non-news event as a news event. And everyone pretty much abided by their designated “unwritten rules;” everyone except Mrs. Palin, for whom “unwritten rules” are just another category of the political orthodoxy to run over like roadkill.

“Any time you have a contest — particularly when unemployment is as high as it is — nobody gets a walkover,” Dean said. “Whoever the Republicans nominate, including people like Sarah Palin, whom the inside-the-Beltway crowd dismisses — my view is if you get the nomination of a major party, you can win the presidency, I don’t care what people write about you inside the Beltway,” Dean said.

Palin can win. Bachmann can win. Cain can win. Ryan can win. Santorum can win. Obama is a sitting duck if confronted with a true, articulate Constitutional conservative. He's a walking, talking disaster as President. And everyone knows it.

U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann, a potential Republican presidential candidate, urged a gathering of Christian conservatives to work to prevent their state governments from implementing the health-care overhaul President Barack Obama pushed into law last year....

Friday, June 3, 2011

Add Moody's to the list of rating agencies concerned over Washington's failure to reconcile its taxing and spending.... We already saw Standard and Poor's making the first move towards downgrading the U.S.'s AAA-rating in April, when it revised its outlook for the nation's debt to negative. Today, Steven Hess, senior credit officer at Moody's, says that if a debt ceiling agreement isn't reached by mid-July, the U.S. could be put on review for downgrade. In his comments, however, he appears to validate the current debt ceiling battle as a good time to make a long-term deficit deal.

Washington - Congressman John Boehner (R-West Chester) released the following statement today in response to a statement by Moody's Investors Service regarding the national debt:

"This report reinforces the point Republicans have been making all year: an increase in the debt limit without major spending cuts will hurt our economy and destroy jobs. As I said just yesterday, the deficit talks led by Vice President Biden are making progress, and Eric Cantor is doing an excellent job representing us in those talks, but the White House needs to step up.

"This report makes clear that if we let this opportunity pass without real deficit reduction, America’s financial standing will be at risk. A credible agreement means the spending cuts must exceed the debt limit increase. The White House needs to get serious right now about dealing with our deficit and debt."

NOTE: Today, Moody’s Investors Service released a statement that said the following:

“[I]f there is no progress on increasing the statutory debt limit in coming weeks, [Moody’s] expects to place the US government's rating under review for possible downgrade, due to the very small but rising risk of a short-lived default. If the debt limit is raised and default avoided, the AAA rating will be maintained. However, the rating outlook will depend on the outcome of negotiations on deficit reduction. A credible agreement on substantial deficit reduction would support a continued stable outlook; lack of such an agreement could prompt Moody's to change its outlook to negative on the AAA rating.”

“The debt limit negotiations represent a real near-term opportunity for agreement on a plan for fiscal consolidation… [F]ailure to reach an agreement as part of the current negotiations would increase the likelihood of a negative outlook in the near term, because the upward debt trajectory would still be in place.”

“Whether the outlook on the rating would be stable or negative would depend upon whether the outcome of the negotiations included meaningful progress toward substantial and credible long-term deficit reduction. Such reduction would imply stabilization within a few years and ultimately a decline in the government's debt ratios, including the ratio of debt to GDP.”
###

In two votes — on competing resolutions that amounted to legislative lectures of Mr. Obama — Congress escalated the brewing constitutional clash over whether he ignored the founding document’s grant of war powers by sending U.S. troops to aid in enforcing a no-fly zone and naval blockade of Libya.

The resolutions were non-binding, and only one of them passed, but taken together, roughly three-quarters of the House voted to put Mr. Obama on notice that he must explain himself or else face future consequences, possibly including having funds for the war cut off.

“He has a chance to get this right. If he doesn’t, Congress will exercise its constitutional authority and make it right,” said House Speaker John A. Boehner...

Geithner's op-ed was also noteworthy because it came the day before GM's stock price plummeted on disappointing May sales numbers.

◼ Obama admin knew GM lied about paying back taxpayers - Conn Carroll/Washington ExaminerThe documents produced as a result of CEI’s FOIA request show GM coordinating PR strategy with the Obama Administration more than three weeks before launching the campaign.

"It's a new poll with the same results—voters will turn down any taxes that go on the ballot, so we'll say it one more time: Jerry Brown should get to work instead of doubling down on bad policies that will put more people out of work. You need only to look at Andrew Cuomo's soaring approval ratings to see that Jerry needs to balance the budget without raising taxes like his fellow Democrat has done in New York."

Brown, in an appearance Wednesday, called the poll "a little hard to interpret" and said he would not back down from his campaign promise to ask for voter sign-off on any tax hikes. Brown instead seized on the result in the poll showing that a strong majority of likely voters, 76%, said they want a say in how the budget is balanced.

The governor said there is "massive support for letting the people decide."

The state budget is clearly on the minds of many voters, according to the poll, with 82% calling it a big problem. But Californians remain divided over how to tackle a deficit now estimated at $10-billion, with 40% backing a mixture of spending cuts and tax hikes and 36% preferring that the books be balanced mostly with cuts.

Some findings of the current survey:
✦ About half of Californians say there need to be major changes in the relationship between state and local governments.
✦ Most Californians generally approve of Governor Jerry Brown’s revised budget plan but less than half support the proposal to extend temporary tax and fee increases.
✦ Sixty-two percent of California adults support cutting funding to state prisons and corrections.

The documents, obtained by Judicial Watch in a December 2010 Freedom of Information Act request, were created after Democrat appointees solidified their 3-2 control of the agency in March 2009....

Free Press is the most vocal of a number of far-left and liberal advocacy groups that for nearly a decade have pushed numerous proposals for vastly increasing government regulation of the Internet.

The evidence of coordination between FCC Democrats and Free Press uncovered by Judicial Watch includes:

Emails between former Free Press president John Silver and Democratic FCC Commissioner Michael Copps from October 2010, coordinating "how we'd like to proceed during these next three months on NN [net neutrality]."

Documents summarizing a phone call between Silver and Copps in which, before an FCC vote on the proposal in November 2010, Silver "emphasized that a strong net neutrality rule is critical to preserving the Internet as a vibrant forum for speech, commerce, innovation and cultural expression."

Correspondence between FCC Special Counsel David Tannenbaum and Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott coordinating speakers for a taxpayer-funded series of FCC "internet workshops" that were intended to generate public support for the proposal.

Free Press was co-founded by Monthly Review editor Robert McChesney and the Nation contributor John Nichols. The Monthly Review is "an independent Marxist journal," while the Nation has long described itself as "the flagship of the left." Free Press is partially funded by George Soros' Open Society Institute....

"We're not on the verge of having a king, but we are on the verge of having way too much dictatorship in Washington, D.C.," Paul said, comparing the U.S.'s current situation to a Biblical tale in which the ancient Israelites demanded, against their own good, that a king rule their land instead of God.

Palin's tour was also derided Wednesday evening by Steve Schmidt, a former advisor to Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign — the one that you might remember featured Palin as the vice presidential nominee.

On CNN's "In the Arena," Schmidt lumped Palin in with Donald Trump and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich as 2012 nonfactors.

"Well, clearly, it's — none of them are going to be president of the United States," Schmidt said. "None of them is going to be the Republican nominee. But you've had this theater of the absurd taking place over the course of much of the spring. In there somewhere is a serious campaign waiting to get started."

"A few years ago, Americans did something that was, actually, very much the sort of thing Americans like to do: We gave someone new a chance to lead, someone we hadn't known for very long, who didn't have much of a record but promised to lead us to a better place," Romney says, describing the man he hopes to meet head-to-head in November 2012.

"At the time, we didn't know what sort of a president he would make. ... Now, in the third year of his four-year term, we have more than promises and slogans to go by. Barack Obama has failed America."

Don't forget to check our CANDIDATES link above, we're adding candidates as they declare, and including their contact information.

Counterfeiting, nuclear component sales, inhuman treatment of its own people -- the list of North Korea's wrongdoing goes on. Lying is a favorite tool of North Korean diplomacy. During the Clinton Administration the North Koreans promised to dismantle their nuclear program, but continued it. In 2002, when then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited from Japan, Kim Jong-il admitted that North Korea had abducted 13 people from Japan and he was, oh, so sorry.

Case closed, so far as Kim was concerned.

Not quite. He was off only by a figure of 180,295. The Washington, D.C.-based Committee for Human Rights in North Korea has released a detailed study on the deliberate and systematic program of North Korea to abduct citizens of other countries for various purposes. The study's title is "TAKEN! North Korea's Criminal Abductions of Citizens of Other Countries."

Not long after the end of World War II, North Korea's founder Kim Il-Sung said, "In order to solve the shortage of intellectuals, we have to bring intellectuals from South Korea." He meant it literally. The systematic kidnapping program began during the Korean War and immediately after the truce, when the country was short of farmers, factory workers and miners. So, during the war, according to the Committee's report, North Korea snatched 82,000 skilled South Koreans and shipped them north. This continued well into the 1980s.

"In the 1960s," according to the report, "93,000 Koreans were lured from Japan and held against their will. A decade later, children of North Korean agents were kidnapped, apparently to blackmail their parents." Also in the 1970s, foreigners in a position to teach North Korean operatives how to infiltrate targets countries were adducted to teach its spy cadres.

The report by the Washington-based committee is the result of three years of research, according to Chuck Downs, its executive director. Yoshi Yamamoto was the principal researcher on the project.

Among the cases that have come to light is one involving a couple who produced films in South Korea. They were kidnapped in Hong Kong in 1978 and forced to produce films in the North. (They escaped in 1986.)

In London in 1983, a North Korean undercover agent enrolled in a language school. promised a Japanese student there a good job for her in North Korea. She took a flight to Pyongyang and disappeared. More than 3,721 South Korean fishermen were apprehended and forcibly towed into North Korean waters. Altogether, abductees were brought to North Korea for 14 countries, among them France, Italy, the Netherlands, the U.S., Lebanon, Malaysia and Thailand.

Although China is an economic benefactor of North Korean, an estimated 200 Chinese on the border have been abducted to North Korea because they were suspected of helping North Korean escapees.

The Committee report also shows an aerial photo pinpointing what is believed to be the compound where today's living abductees are domiciled. According to Downs, "If you lived there you would have no idea where you were on the face of the earth. You would just think that you are in a valley surrounded by mountains."

Richard Allen, co-chairman of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, says, "This is an ongoing criminal enterprise." It certainly is. With its abduction program, North Korea is violating at least eight international laws.

The United States and the rest of its Group of Five -- South Korea, Japan, China, Russia -- have been lied to by Kim Jong-il time and again. Indeed, the Bush Administration, after the last set of promises-to-be-broken by Kim & Co., took North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Mr. Obama, having (to hear him tell it) dispatched Osama bin Laden, should now put North Korea back on the list.

__________________________

Peter Hannaford

Peter was closely associated with the late President Ronald Reagan for a number of years, beginning in the 1970s. He was vice chairman of the Governor’s Consumer Fraud Task Force, then the governor’s sole public appointee to the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency’s governing board, then Assistant to the Governor and Director of Public Affairs in the Governor’s Office, Sacramento.

When Mr. Reagan’s second term expired, Peter and another senioir aide, Michael Deaver, founded a public affairs/public relations firm in Los Angeles (Deaver & Hannaford, Inc.) and Mr. Reagan became their lead client. They managed his public program until his election as president. In his 1976 campaign for the presidential nomination, Peter was his co-director of issues and research. In the 1980 campaign he was senior communications consultant to Mr. Reagan.

With the Reagan victory in November 1980, both men could not go into the White House. Mike Deaver did, as deputy chief of staff, while Peter continued with the company to manage it. He movedits headquarters to Washington, D.C. During the Reagan years he was involved in a number of volunteer activities including membership on the United States Information Agency’s Public Relations Advisory Committee, the board of trustees of the White House Preservation Fund, consultant to the President’s Privatization Commission and active in the President’s Private Sector Initiatives program.

After nearly three decades in Washington, Peter returned to his native state of California in 2006.
He remains a member of the board of directors of the Washington-based Committee on the Present Danger and a senior counselor of APCO Worldwide, a Washington-based public affairs/strategic communications firm. Currently, he is chairman of the Humboldt County Republican Party and lives in Eureka.

He is the author of 11 books (most of them about U.S. presidents) and a frequent contributor to opinion magazines and their online editions.

The last month has been a horror show for the U.S. economy, with economic data falling off a cliff, according to Mike Riddell, a fund manager at M&G Investments in London.

"It seems that almost every bit of data about the health of the US economy has disappointed expectations recently," said Riddell, in a note sent to CNBC on Wednesday.

"US house prices have fallen by more than 5 percent year on year, pending home sales have collapsed and existing home sales disappointed, the trend of improving jobless claims has arrested, first quarter GDP wasn’t revised upwards by the 0.4 percent forecast, durables goods orders shrank, manufacturing surveys from Philadelphia Fed, Richmond Fed and Chicago Fed were all very disappointing."

"And that’s just in the last week and a bit," said Riddell.

Pointing to the dramatic turnaround in the Citigroup "Economic Surprise Index" for the United States, Riddell said the tumble in a matter of months to negative from positive is almost as bad as the situation before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.

The labor force — those who have a job or are looking for one — is getting smaller, even though the economy is growing and steadily adding jobs. That trend defies the rules of a normal economic recovery.

Nobody is sure why it's happening. Economists think some of the missing workers have retired, have entered college or are getting by on government disability checks. Others have probably just given up looking for work.

A little more than a week ago, Vice President Joe Biden traveled to fundraisers in two battleground-state cities, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati.

Neither stop included the White House press corps; requests by local media to cover the events were denied by the vice president's press office. The Democratic National Committee arranged the events for the Obama Victory Fund.

A number of seasoned political reporters and former White House press-office staffers consider that lack of coverage a dangerous precedent....

Several former and current White House correspondents see presidents choosing who covers them as a nightmare scenario. The correspondents also are agitated by Biden's refusal to be covered by local media, even if that means reporters cooling their heels outside an invitation-only fundraiser.

But Monday, two things became clear: She will not shy away from unscripted encounters, and she isn't going let anyone know in advance where she's going as she wends her way across the country this summer.

In an impromptu news conference Monday evening in the parking lot of her Gettysburg hotel shortly after taking a four-mile run in steaming heat, Palin said she thought the current crop of Republican presidential contenders is "strong" and that any campaign she might wage "would definitely be unconventional and nontraditional, yes, knowing us, yeah, it would have to be."

◼ Tea party 2012 effect stirs GOP trepidation - Washington TimesRepublicans, once ecstatic about the energy generated by the 2009 anti-spending tea party uprising, are growing increasingly uneasy about the impact in 2012 of a movement that seems beyond the control of anyone, including its own leaders.

“The nature of the tea party and liberty movement is that there really are very few, if any, authoritative spokespersons,” said Ryan Call,Colorado GOP chairman.

“The fact that the grass-roots movement is somewhat leaderless is one of its strengths, but it also makes the movement susceptible to individuals or groups co-opting the ‘tea party label in inappropriate and damaging ways, like we saw in the May 24 New York 26th [Congressional] District special election.”

President Obama is hoping to change voters' views of his controversial bailout of the auto industry and turn his own political liability against Republicans amid signs that U.S. automakers are rebounding.
At the height of the bailout rage -- when the government pumped billions of dollars into General Motors and Chrysler despite a Republican outcry -- it would have been difficult for liberals to craft a winning political message defending big-government spending.

But now that Chrysler has repaid its $5.1 billion loans six years early, Obama is traveling to one of the company's plants in the battleground state of Ohio this week to make the case that the bailout was good for the auto industry and the ailing American economy.

For the White House, the improving auto industry offers an opportunity to rebrand massive government spending and the president's agenda in a positive light. Administration officials see the effort as a cornerstone of the president's re-election bid, particularly in the Rust Belt and other states with deep stakes in the auto industry.

Rolling Thunder is an annual motorcycle rally that is held in Washington, DC during the Memorial Day weekend to call for the government's recognition and protection of Prisoners of War (POWs) and those Missing in Action (MIAs). About 400,000 veterans will roar across Washington, DC on their motorcycles as a tribute to American war heroes.

Welcome

Hi, I'm John Schutt, chairman of the Humboldt County Republican Central Committee: Want to get involved? We need republicans for open spots on the central committee, committee seats, letters to the editor writers, and more. Send me your thoughts and ideas on making Humboldt great again. Please feel free to call the office (442-2259) or leave a message here (or on Facebook) and I will get back to you as soon as possible.